"Now if you don't go I shall knock you down." He shook his fist to reinforce the feebleness of his alien speech. The Swiss peasant stepped off the path hurriedly into a snow-drift. He was a reasonable man, and he did not grasp why one mad Englishman should wish to be killed, nor, for the matter of that, why others equally mad, should wish to prevent it. So he walked off in the direction of St. Moritz and hid behind a tree, reposing upon the deeply rooted instinct of not being responsible for what he did not see. Winn regarded the run methodically, placed his toboggan on the summit of the leap, and looked down at the thin, blue streak stretching into the distance. The valley appeared to be entirely empty; there was nothing visibly moving in it except a little distant smoke on the way to Samaden. The run looked very cold and very narrow; the nearest banks stood up like cliffs. Winn strapped a rake to his left foot, and calculated that the instant he felt the ice under him he must dig into it, otherwise he would go straight over the first bank. Then he crouched over his toboggan, threw himself face downward, and felt it spring into the air. He kept no very definite recollection of the sixty-odd seconds that followed. The ice rose up at him like a wall; the wind--he had not previously been aware of the faintest draught of air--cut into his eyes and forehead like fire. His lips blistered under it. He felt death at every dizzy, dwindling second--death knotted up and racketing, so imminent that he wouldn't have time to straighten himself out or let go of his toboggan before he would be tossed out into the empty air. He remembered hearing a man say that if you fell on the Cresta and didn't let go of your toboggan, it knocked you to pieces. His hands were fastened on the runners as if they were clamped down with iron. The scratching of the rake behind him sounded appalling in the surrounding silence. He shot up the first bank, shaving the top by the thinness of a hair, wobbled sickeningly back on to the straight, regained his grip, shot the next bank more easily, and whirled madly down between the iron walls. He felt as if he were crawling slowly as a fly crawls up a pane of glass, in a buzzing eternity. Then he was bumped across the road and shot under the bridge. There was a hill at the end of the run. As he flew up it he became for the first time aware of pace. The toboggan took it like a racing-cutter, and at the top rose six feet into the air, and plunged into the nearest snow-drift. Winn crawled out, feeling very sick and shaken, and as if every bone in his body was misplaced. "Oh, you idiot! You idiot! you unbounded, God-forsaken idiot!" a voice exclaimed in his ears. "You've given me the worst two minutes of my life!" Winn looked around him more annoyed than startled. He felt a great disinclination for speech and an increasing desire to sit down and keep still; and he did not care to conduct a quarrel sitting down.